19/08/2026
Honourable mentions for Gold Hill Museum …
Shaftesbury's Gold Hill has landed a fresh endorsement that could bring real value to the local economy, rather than just local pride. Travel title Discover Britain has named it among the country's top ten prettiest streets, and it's the magazine's readership that makes this significant. Discover Britain's audience is largely based overseas, in America, Canada and Australia, made up of the British diaspora and anglophiles planning their next trip home or their first visit to the UK. So this isn't a nod from a domestic guide that locals already know well. It's the kind of feature that puts Shaftesbury firmly on the radar for visitors from across the Atlantic and beyond, people who could be booking flights, hotels and days out on the strength of it.
The magazine describes the cobbled climb as enduring in the public imagination more than 40 years after it starred in the famous Hovis bread advert, directed by a young Ridley Scott, who'd go on to make Blade Runner and Alien. Many, it says, still know it simply as Hovis Hill.
Writer Henrietta Easton points to the street's steep incline, in excess of 16 degrees, and to the 14th-century St Peter's Church at the top, alongside the Gold Hill Museum, with its free admission and prized Byzant, once carried through the town each year to honour the Lord of the Manor of Motcombe for allowing residents to draw water from the village below.
The magazine also highlights the museum's cottage garden, with its views over Blackmore Vale, once home to novelist Thomas Hardy, and calls the classic shot from the top of the hill, looking down over the thatched roofs, one of the most photographed views in the country, also captured on film in the 1967 version of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd.
Gold Hill shares the list with some equally famous names: Castle Combe in Wiltshire, York's Shambles, Vicars' Close in Wells, Mermaid Street in Rye, Elm Hill in Norwich, Pier Road in Luss, Steep Hill in Lincoln, and Keere Street in Lewes.
